Bonnaroo Music Festival celebrated its 13th year June 12 – June 15. The festival attracted the likes of Elton John, Lionel Richie, Kanye West and plenty more to perform for about 90,000 sweat-drenched fans.
It’s no secret that, between and during concerts, festivalgoers passed time by taking any number of illicit drugs, marijuana being of the least concern. This is the reality for most every music festival, as backed up by all personal and official accounts.
Music festivals also tend to attract a resoundingly white demographic, as any festivalgoer could attest.
Yet despite the alarmingly large population of white, neo- and ex-hippies walking around a 700-acre farm on MDMA, LSD, peyote and just about anything else, very few police officers worked the event.
As an attendee, I saw only two horse-mounted cops during my entire stay. That’s it. Surely, there were more working, but not enough to pose a real threat to drug users’ comfort.
Richard Nixon launched his War on Drugs campaign roughly 40 years ago, during the summer of 1971. Many speculate he wanted to target the African-American community specifically, due to the high rates of cocaine use in impoverished areas inhabited primarily by black people.
The actual “War,” however, did not begin until the mid 1980s.
Since then, according to a 2011 report by Forbes, more than 25.4 million Americans have been incarcerated due to drug-related charges. Of those incarcerated, 62 percent have been black Americans, despite making up only 12 percent of the population in the U.S.
“Black men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men,” Erik Kain, author of the Forbes article, reports.
The racial disparity does not exist because black people are more likely to engage in drug use than white people, but because they are disproportionately targeted for theose crimes.
“Arresting and incarcerating people fills prisons and destroys lives but does not reduce availability of illicit drugs or the power of criminal organizations,” Kain writes, citing the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
Further, if the war on drugs were really about reducing drug use and not about debilitating non-white communities, cops would crack down at music festivals, making record arrests. It’s time to end this racist War on Drugs.